1Paul Veyne's quip "History has no method" (1978) is an invitation to re-examine the methodology of translation history and is particularly germane to Latin America, where many Eurocentric concepts are inapplicable.

2After a brief review of the methodology of translation history, both in general and with special attention to Latin America, this paper discusses some issues specific to translation history research in this region and the place of subjectivity and rigour in translation history. Finally, some guidelines for future research are proposed.

Review of methodology

3It is no exaggeration to say that a good part of current translation history methodology is "normative" and quite often "negative," emphasizing what researchers "should not do." Jean Delisle (1997), to cite a notable example, starts by asking "how to write the history of translation" and continues on to claim that it is necessary to "write history like historians do." Delisle's five anachronic ways of "doing translation history," it will be recalled, are: 1. chronicles or annals (chronological series of translation-related events), 2. catalogues of translation (useful, but not historical), 3. compilations of first-person accounts (neither historical summaries nor theoretical), 4. anecdotal narratives (only useful if true, verifiable, and relevant), and 5. biographical anthologies (usually more passionate than objective). For Delisle, history must be more than the mere description of events and must also include an interpretive element.

4Anthony Pym (2001) recommends that every study take translators as its starting point and proceed subsequently to a consideration of intercultural questions. His typology of historical research comprises three types of studies: 1. anecdotal-dilettante (based on a single event, author, or text; despite inadequate data, claims to provide generally applicable results; useful, but uncritical and often of questionable value); 2. archaeological or historiographical (present all the available data related to an event, author, or text; useful by virtue of their restitution of fragments of a translation heritage, but ultimately incomplete and unsatisfying); 3. interpretative (discuss and interpret the general applicability of all the available data related to an event, author, or text, and communicate findings).

5In 1998, Pym also enunciated four framing methodological principles: 1. study the "why," that is, the social cause; 2. study the "who" rather than the texts; 3. study translators' social contexts; 4) study the past to shed light on the future.

6Lieven D'hulst (2001), for his part, listed some basic questions that should be posed in any research on translation history: Why? What is the intellectual biography of the translators? What? What has and has not been translated? (The answer to this question requires translation bibliographies of various types: general, specialized, national, historical, and so forth.) Where? Where were the translations executed, printed, published, and distributed? Who was responsible for these tasks and why? Where did translation studies specialists work? Where were the schools? With what? What support was provided for the execution of the translations? Was there sponsorship or censorship? What power relationships framed the translations? Why? For whom were the translations executed? Why were the texts translated the way they were? (Even if the answers are only hypothetical, they have heuristic value.) How? How were the translations produced (assuming it is possible to reconstruct the process)? According to the standards of a specific time? According to new historical or geographic standards? When? What point in history does the research focus on? To what end? What was the impact of the translation? What was its goal? To what use did the target culture put it?

7Samuel López Alcalá (2001), inspired largely by Brigitte Lépinette (1997), presents two analytical models: sociocultural and historical-descriptive. The sociocultural model situates the phenomenon of interest in the sociocultural contexts of production and reception. The historical-descriptive model includes both descriptive-comparative and descriptive-contrastive studies. Descriptive-comparative studies are diachronic studies that compare theories of translation and the evolution of metaconcepts in translation studies. Descriptive-contrastive studies, on the other hand, analyze translations of the same source text in order to identify the strategies adopted by different translators.

8Paul St-Pierre (1993), in turn, proposed a discursive approach to translation that seeks not "to determine whether a translation transforms and thus — as conventional wisdom would often have it — betrays an original text, but rather... how such a transformation is carried out and the conditions which make it possible" (1993, 82). In other words, his approach recognizes that translation is a historical discourse that "contributes to an awareness of the elements underlying one's own culture, conditioning the definition of one's collective self in terms of (and very often in denial of) another, the other" (1993, 61).

9This brief overview demonstrates that emphasis has clearly, indeed inevitably, been placed on historiographical rigour. (Some methodological errors with serious consequences will be discussed below.) The importance of objectivity has also been emphasized, even if the interpretation of historical facts, recommended by all authors, leads researchers down the path of subjectivity. And it is precisely the place of subjectivity in the study of Latin American translation that calls for some nuancing and clarification.

State of the question in Latin America

10Prior to the 1980s, cultural studies of Latin America — whether historical, literary, sociological, or political — reflected an essentially Eurocentric vision of the subcontinent and its peoples. According to this perspective, "bourgeois humanism" is the primary expression of a nation's liberal utopian characteristics of homogeneity, consensuality, and discipline. This is hardly surprising since "by virtue of the universality of the European historical experience, the forms of knowledge developed for the understanding of this society have become the only valid, objective, and universal forms of knowledge" (Lander 2003, 23).2

11The current state of affairs in cultural studies can be summarized as follows:

121. Latin America is still often perceived and studied in terms of the civilization/barbarism dichotomy, as if the 1970s epistemological turn in ethnography (Buzelin 2004) had left historians and sociologists untouched. Under the aegis of European condescension and magnanimity, the history of Latin America could be said to have "evolved" from the noble savage (of Las Casas) to the noble revolutionary (of Che Guevara). Carlos Rangel's 1976 essay is a perfect illustration and interpretation of this evolution. Such a typically reductive vision is inherently unable to take in all the complexity of the cultures that it persists in casting, all things considered, as "primitive." And, of course, it rejects the very notion of "métissage" (Laplantine and Nouss 1997) as insolent in its simplicity. It is this vision which is responsible for the expression "the discovery of America by Christopher Columbus," despite the fact that 300 million speak of "the discovery of Christopher Columbus by America."

132. In general, historical surveys have tended to adopt the universalistic structures of European history and have grouped the centuries into classical (the first human migrations), medieval (indigenous civilizations), Renaissance (adoption of European cultural and intellectual capital), and modern (timidly conceded) periods. Such anachronistic periodization is inconceivable today.

143. Racist beliefs continue to shade many studies. One need only glance at the opening pages of the latest edition of the Histoire de l'Amérique latine (Chaunu 2003):

To talk about Latin America is to affirm the unity of that world, as opposed to Anglophone America, and to the 215 million people whose alien mouths speak, for the most part, more or less deformed Iberian languages.3 (3)

The most brilliant Indian civilizations yielded to European culture with exceptional rapidity. A congenital weakness of the Indians?4 (4)

This result [the collapse of indigenous cultures] is perhaps more the result of societal superiority than of technical superiority.5 (18)

15The author of this history, Pierre Chaunu, does not miss any opportunity to evoke the spectre of the "cruel mythology" of the indigenous populations or to underscore the fact that there was "no cohesion between peoples, no internal social cohesion" (5).

164. As Angel Rama (1984) has pointed out, recorded history is the history of the elites, particularly the city-dwelling and lettered elites. Of the literate and urban, therefore. Since the sixteenth century, indeed, the "lettered city" has been the centre of decision making and executive power, the religious, administrative, educational, professional, and cultural heart of society. "The masters of literacy in illiterate societies... proceeded to sacralize it, in keeping with the constitutive grammatological tendency of European culture."6 (Rama 1984, 33). Although faithful to sociopolitical realities, this history overlooks the contribution, non-negligible at the very least, of "uncultivated" populations to the cultural, political, and social life of the subcontinent. For, in point of fact, "the letter was always obeyed, although in reality it was not followed, and this was as true during the colonial period, with its royal schedules, as it was during the Republic, with its constitutional texts"7 (Rama 1984, 42). For all its focus on letters, however, this history remains silent about a secondary "literature" (newspapers, correspondence, graffiti) worthy of mention.

175. Hispano-American history is characterized by an overemphasis on the French Revolution in comparison with the American Revolution. According to Grases (1981, 271),

The cliché which would have the influence of the French Revolution be the determinant factor in the emancipation of Hispano-America has persisted for two hundred years. Today, not only is this claim questioned, but increasing documentary evidence indicates that the ideology and success of the independence of the United States were key elements in the fate of the Spanish-speaking continent.8

18Another determinant factor, according to Grases, was the "spirit of liberty profoundly rooted in the Hispanic nature." There is other convincing evidence that the American declaration of independence of 1776 (and subsequent declarations) played a greater role in Hispanic America than did the French declaration of 1789. As Brewer Carías (1992, 202–203) notes:

The goal of the French declaration was not the establishment of a new state; rather, it was adopted as a revolutionary act within a pre-existing national, monarchic state. The American declarations, in contrast, were acts of protest destined to construct new states and, by extension, new citizens.9

196. Recorded history (and culture) are essentially "evenemential" (Veyne 1978): they are limited to elites, "great men," and the grand texts of conventional history. The incontestably great names of Latin American translation include La Malinche and Felipillo in the colonial period, and Borges and Paz in the contemporary period. However, this perspective neglects the entire span of "non-evenemential" translation history, which is to say the body of translational acts performed by less glorious actors such as educational institutions, newspapers, magazines, government departments, "tertulias," and salons. As Julio-César Santoyo states in this very volume, it is in fact the entire history of translation in Latin America which is "blank."

20These Eurocentric models or approaches were inevitably adopted by many Latin America scholars. It was only in the 1980s that a generation of researchers appeared — literary critics for the most part (Angel Rama, Antonio Cornejo Polar, Nestor García Canclini, Beatriz González Stephan, amongst others) — intent on better reflecting the complexity of the Latin American reality that escaped the binary and homogenizing canonical or official Eurocentric models. Unfortunately, so little translation history research of this sort has been conducted that it is impossible to cite examples of its orientation or results (see, however, http://www.histal.umontreal.ca).

General principles for a history of Latin American culture

21In light of the situation outlined above, a shift from a simple to a complex paradigm is imperative. "It becomes obvious that these concepts of acculturation and assimilation fail to take into account the complexity of the processes of cultural contact, i.e. the dynamics of intrusion and disjunction"10 (Simon 1999, 30). Accordingly, a conceptual framework for the analysis of various specifically Latin American sociocultural situations and phenomena has been developed.

22The first feature of this framework is HYBRIDITY. According to Néstor García Canclini (1989), hybrid cultures are intercultural blends that incorporate practices from popular cultures into their general cultural reference systems. Hybridity should not be confused with "métissage," which, in Latin America, has ethnic or racial connotations, or with "syncretism," which refers to the merging of religions or of traditional symbolic movements (1989, 14–15).

23Sherry Simon (1999), in her work on cultural encounter and exchange in countries like Canada and cities like Montreal, also espouses the concept of hybridity. For Simon, hybridity is distinct from syncretism, creolization, and métissage, which "suggest that the dynamic of cultural meetings gives rise to new, long-lasting identities"11 (1999, 31). In fact, she claims the hybrid is "not a new synthesis, not an end,"12 and endorses Homi Bhabha's observation that hybridity is a "third space" (quoted by Simon 1999, 31), a zone of negotiation, dissent, and exchange, the locus of "a 'translational culture' that short-circuits patterns of alterity in order to express the drift of contemporary identities"13 (1999, 39–40). It should be noted, in passing, that this concept of "transculturation," found in Bhabha and Simon14 amongst others, is a product of Latin America, having been advanced by the Cuban Fernando Ortiz (1947)15 to take into account the

highly varied phenomena that have come about in Cuba as a result of the extremely complex transmutations of culture that have taken place here,... either in the economic or in the institutional, legal, ethical, religious, artistic, linguistic, psychological, sexual, or other aspects of its life. (Ortiz 1947, 98)

24Other concepts that are useful in explaining both the complexity and the transitional yet enduring nature of Latin American cultures include Antonio Cornejo Polar's (1994) "contradictory totality" and "non-dialectical heterogeneity," as well as Oswald de Andrade's (1928) "anthropophagy."

25Cornejo Polar's (1982, 49) CONTRADICTORY TOTALITY is a cultural totality composed more of contradictions than of harmonies, a space filled with internal contradictions. It is, however, useful to emphasize that "contradictory" is synonymous not with "tension" but with "contradiction" and "paradox." NON-DIALECTICAL HETEROGENEITY is the term used by Cornejo Polar to reflect the experience of deterritorialization and cultural reinsertion. In Escribir en el Aire (1994), he explains the term:

Here, everything is mixed with everything, and the coarsest contrasts are juxtaposed, face to face, daily. The verbal representations of this intense and viscerally dislocated social village also impose codes of rupture and fragmentation.16 (1994, 22)

26García Canclini's hybridity and Cornejo Polar's contradictory totality and non-dialectical heterogeneity are eloquent reflections of the transitional state of Latin America's search for identity, cultural claims making, and political affirmation. This heterogeneous and contradictory nature must be accepted if the efforts at emancipation, the later battles for independence, and the successive failures and triumphs in the establishment of republics, expressed in and through translations of European and North American books, declarations, letters, songs, and texts of other types, are to be analyzed.

27Finally, a word about the "anthropophagy movement" that emerged from Brazil and has elicited much comment. In this context, "anthropophagy" has nothing in common with cannibalism, which is a typically European, "civilized" notion applied to a certain type of "barbarism" (see, however, Montaigne's argument in the Essais). The movement was initiated by Oswald de Andrade with his Anthropophagic Manifesto (1928), published in Brazil. Although originally intended as a comment on the visual arts, the ideas it enunciated rapidly influenced other disciplines. It is both an intensely political activist doctrine and a source of an immensely enriching creative practice that encourages creators, authors, to "nourish" themselves from foreign sources without however accepting their influence and traditional mimesis (Vieira 1994, 67). The movement seeks to strengthen indigenous literatures, encouraging them not only to retain all their own ethnic components but also to integrate indigenous elements into the foreign artistic forms they appropriate.

28To fully grasp this sociocultural reality, it is useful to examine the three constitutive elements — sociocultural, political, and educational — of the still unrealized emancipator project embarked upon at the very moment Americans discovered Christopher Columbus. The goal of the first is the invention of a new citizen, for the simple reason that colonization prevented Latin Americans from continuing to be what they had been. The second, which arose in the eighteenth century, finds expression in uprisings and wars, but also in anti-colonial and anti-imperialistic discourses intended to establish the foundations of political organization. The goal of the third, which also dates from the eighteenth century, is the training of future generations in universal, but American-inspired, knowledge.17

Orientations for a history of translation

29The preceding discussion may seem at quite a remove from translation, but how can one discuss the transcultural (and, by extension, translation) without a knowledge of the cultural? This is a simple question of rigour, even though the concepts in play reflect a typically Latin American subjectivity.

30It would be valuable, before "imported" models can establish themselves in this research field, to evaluate the applicability of the new paradigm, described above, to translation. Clearly, inapplicable periodizations and historical, anthropological, and sociological models are inappropriate bases for the evaluation of translation methodology and the impact of translators and translations. A specific, and thus subjective, vision is needed. Several guidelines can be derived from the preceding review of the situation and discussion of key concepts.

311. HISTORY MUST BECOME NON-EVENEMENTIAL. Veyne (1978, 32–34) tells us: "An immense non-evenemential space remains to be cleared!" This should not be difficult with respect to translation, as the act of translation has been too long considered a non-event, and thus unworthy of interest. While they use translation on a daily basis, historians have nonetheless never felt the need to make it one of their objects of study. The first step in the construction of the non-evenemential is the consideration of "minor," or grey, literature such as the press, pamphlets, columns, correspondence, and even graffiti. To this must be added "oraliture", tertulias, songs, theatrical performances, and other forms of oral expression. Lastly, translation history researchers should eschew the "great names" (generally famous poets and novelists) and seek out the throngs of neglected translators. Some authors have started to do precisely this, despite the omnipresent but understandable temptation — since translators are necessarily part of the "lettered," the privileged — to focus on the elites.18

322. LATIN AMERICAN TRANSLATION SHOULD NEVER BE HOMOGENIZED OR STRAITJACKETED. Latin American translation should be left heterogeneous, its contradictions embraced. While research to date clearly suggests that appropriation is the primary mode of Latin American translation, it is nevertheless clear that some contradictions must be addressed. These include Miranda's literal translation of Viscardo's Lettre aux Espagnols Américains,19 Nariño's Declaration of the Rights of Man,20 and some elements of the translations of Andrés Bello and Pérez Bonalde. Even Borges never attempted to hide his contradictions.21

333. RIGOUR IS THE PARAMOUNT VIRTUE OF RESEARCH. The often difficult and discouraging context of Hispano-American historiographic research is no justification for a lack of rigour. The following examples are telling illustrations of the importance of rigour.

• Researchers are often obliged to scan certain documents because the originals are too fragile or are in a format (old forms of writing, spacing, font, and so on) that precludes optimal analysis. However, scanning is a double-edged sword: as with every rapidly developing technology, it is only reliable up to a point. For example, while scanning the Viscardo's Lettre, we failed to notice the omission of a sentence fragment. The resultant sentence remained logical and comprehensible but now had a radically modified meaning. It was only by pure chance that we spotted our error of interpretation, reflecting the new textual meaning resulting from our negligence, prior to the publication of the article.
• Translation history research often requires exploration of primary historical sources (and, incidentally, sometimes identifies serious deficiencies in the sacrosanct rigour of historians). Indirect references (secondary or tertiary), although dangerous and methodologically risky, are thus rife. But researchers must be doubly vigilant when the absence of primary sources renders their use unavoidable. Dates taken from other research must be meticulously checked. We once claimed that a Spanish cleric had destroyed Mayan documents when in fact he was actually in Spain — in primary school!
• Similarly, haste and negligence once led us to incorrectly state — presumably because our source had been published in Mexico — that Francisco Ayala is Mexican, when he is, as Carmen Acuña Partal (1999, 158) has quite rightly pointed out, actually Spanish.
• Amazing and fascinating as it may be, the Google family of search engines is not infallible. During the graphical composition of the HISTAL home page, which presents several famous Latin American translators, we used Google Image to locate a portrait of Nariño, the first translator of the Declaration of the Rights of Man in Latin America. While we accepted Google Image's identification of the painting as a portrait of Nariño, it turned out to be of King Fernando VII of Spain.
• The rigour of translators should be of no lesser quality than the much-vaunted rigour of historians. And translation history research may unearth some unexpected discoveries. For instance, no translation studies scholar would hesitate to attribute to Antoine Berman the first and perhaps only French translation of Schleiermacher's famous essay. However, a meticulous comparison of the Spanish (1978) and French (1985) translations, by Valentín García Yebra and Antoine Berman, respectively,22 reveals surprising syntactical and lexical similarities, suggesting, astonishingly, that Berman's French translation was not performed from the original German but rather from the Spanish translation! Although unconfirmed, this hypothesis is an eloquent demonstration of how historiographical research can also challenge received truths.

344. THERE IS SUCH A THING AS NECESSARY SUBJECTIVITY. Objective history is impossible, and would, in any event, be extremely boring. Interpretation implies subjectivity, as all the translation scholars cited in the literature review acknowledge, albeit to varying extents. The very choice of an object of study is a question of subjectivity. Even the organizational decisions related to the research product, including the table of contents, notes, and even the publisher, are unquestionably the fruit of researchers' personal and subjective visions.

35It is our claim, therefore, that the essential and indispensable historiographical rigour of historical research must be accompanied by a subjectivity that reflects the nature of the object of study and that is, thus, itself a part of the method. In this light, the liberation of translation in Latin America from Eurocentrism and the fixation (often through canonical literature) on elites depends on the following points:

36a. THE ADOPTION OF A SPECI F IC DISCOURSE, that is, the threefold discourse recommended by Briceño Guerrero (1993), the Venezuelan philosopher and philologist. According to Guerrero, Latin American emotional attitudes and political action involve three discourses: 1. The second European discourse, imported in the late eighteenth century (at the time of the French Revolution), which encompasses rationalism, illustration, and social utopia; 2. The Christian-Hispanic discourse, or mantuano, which governs Latin Americans' individual behaviour, family relationships, and feelings of dignity, honour, and happiness; 3. The savage discourse, which finds expression in the most intimate emotions and relativizes the other two discourses through humour, intoxication, and a secret, global refusal. These are concomitant, heterogeneous, contradictory, but not dialectical discourses. This brings us back to our starting point.

37b. THE ADOPTION OF A SPECIFICALLY HISPANO-AMERICAN PERIODIZATION rather different from the classic European model. In fact, the historical evolution of Latin American and European discourses are as different as their contents. This being so, their periodizations must also be different. We have previously (Bastin 1998) proposed the following periodization: Encounter and conquest (1492–1533, Christopher Columbus to the fall of Atahualpa and Moctezuma); Colonial period (sixteenth to eighteenth century); Pre-independence and Emancipation (1750–1830; first insurrections to the end of Gran Colombia); Independence and Republic (1830–1920); and 1920 to the present.

38While it is still very difficult to trace the historical evolution of translation, given the paucity of relevant research, it is clear that this evolution had nothing in common with its European counterpart, marked by the coming and going between free and literal translation, the "belles infidèles," and "historical reconstitution." Andrea Pagni concluded his research on Andrés Bello thus: "We may conceive of translation as a practice of displacement that contributed to the emergence of new cultural paradigms, rather than as the more or less successful, but always inferior, repetition of previous cultural paradigms"23 (Pagni 2003, 354). This is precisely what Latin American translation is: displacing and creative, politically, economically, educationally, and culturally committed — a specific and, above all, appropriate practice and space.

39c. THE REHABILITATION OF LOCAL CULTURAL SPACES to the detriment of the Eurocentric, colonial vision. It is here that subjectivity is most active. This rehabilitation is indispensable in Latin America (and other postcolonial situations), if only out of a concern for "historical truth." And it is here that the Latin American translator, confronted with Pierre Chaunu's Que sais-je?, after rectifying the racist statements, would translate the book as if the question had been "What should be known?" or "What should Chaunu have known?" rather than "What do I know?" Such rehabilitation can only be accomplished through the agency of specific concepts such as those described above. In the words of Aníbal Quijano (2003, 242): "It is time to stop being what we are not!"24

Conclusion

40By emphasizing translators' methods and not text objects, a global transcultural approach could engender a true liberating role for translation. The analysis and interpretation of texts and translation strategies through the eyes and the peripheral way of living of those who translated, rather than through the "Western," elitist prism, requires a paradigm shift, a sort of deconstruction.

41The Latin American–specific conceptual framework proposed here in the hope of orienting the research methodology of translation history has yet to be tested. In fact, although partially verified, it awaits confirmation by other, hopefully numerous, studies.